That said, your comment on wikis points out a classic issue - 1-9-90 is the typical ratio between creaters, participants and passive non-interaction types. How does the ROI get better if the technology doesn't help increase the number of people engaged.

1:10

[Comment From Harry ]

Given a team needs to put together a proposal, what would the collaborative workflow look like using a social networking site?

1:11

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Whihc is why we see a number of specific technologies aimed a either certain problems - like Rypple, a Canadian based software firm that focuses on employment engagement and wants to move past the old style of annual reviews

1:11

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

or on specific departments.

1:13

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Harry - it depends on the purpose and nature of the department/group looking at the social networking site. For instance, marketing departments now have to engage with social business through facebook, twitter and other sources. How do they model the escalation of problems, or the feedback of successes? It's not that different than the previous model for customer service - the difference is in scale, speed and permanent public transparency

1:14

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

for internal use cases - I would advise looking at the costs of using free or low-cost technologies & compare the time, and cost savings for those versus hosting everything yourself, including back-up, retention, network data charges, etc.

1:15

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

versus the classic cc:ing everyone on emails, which leads to mass frustration

1:16

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

That reminds me. Chris Anderson of Wired.com recently published an email charter: http://emailcharter.org

1:17

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

with 10 rules to try and stop people from drowning in email. There are some really useful ones in there that people should consider adopting.

1:17

[Comment From Andrew ]

Can you give some specific examples of how you see different social media platforms being used in a corporate environment?

1:19

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Andrew: Here's some examples from recent experience. Yammer - it's like a Twitter for enterprise or corporate use. It's real value to find other people in large corporations who have similar problems or experiences without having to cc: the entire company. So "Has anyone responded to a similar RFP" or equivalent. Moreover, the exchanges are captured & managers can use them to improve the internal business processes if recurring problems are discussed

1:20

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Salesforce.com launched Chatter as a collaboration tool that can be opened within your sales CRM engine.

1:20

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

which lets individuals within that department collaborate on their specific business process, with real-time, live access to the data

1:21

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Rypple - again, in terms of supporting the classic old school HR function of performance appraisal. Now it's real-time, visible, transparent and not unidirectional .

1:21

[Comment From Kevin ]

What do you believe will happen to inter-office etiquette?

1:22

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Jive is another interesting company - it lets you aggregate between these types of collaboration tools (IM, email, wiki's and the like) to search better

1:23

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

Kevin - that can be pretty funny topic. In many ways, culture is self-policing. People DON'T SEND TOO MANY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS BEFORE THEY'RE CONVINCED OF WHY IT'S WRONG.

1:23

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

But the bigger deal is legal, HR and the lowering barrier between personal and professional lives

1:24

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

For instance, people have been fired for blogs all the way back to deuce in, what, 2005?

1:24

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

now they're being fired for twitter errors

1:25

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

partially because the lines between what's acceptable are blurry & changing every year, with every new technology. For instance, a senior manager at Microsoft's new Mobility group was just let go for releasing some spec's on a phone thru twitter.

1:26

[Comment From Nigel Wallis]

but at the same time, he was charged with being enthusiastic & evangelizing the merits of their phones. Where's the line?

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